This book is a welcome and useful collection of short selections
from primary sources in translation, with concise linking
commentary. Down to Kant, the arrangement is chronological, but
thereafter it breaks up into sections composed around distinctive
approaches to the subject. Though it is nowhere identified as such,
it seems very much the sort of successful anthology that emerges
from several practice runs in a well-organized advanced
undergraduate or beginning graduate course. Everything about it is
clear, concise, and utilitarian.

Two limitations need to be marked for readers of BMCR. First,
the ancient and medieval sections fill only 30 pages, and the
ancient authors are limited to Hippocrates, Aristotle, Quintilian,
Sextus Empiricus, and St. Augustine. Second, the anthologist is
himself an analytic philosopher and has deliberately constructed
this selection to complement others now in existence and to be
used with existing histories of semiotics. Accordingly, the
emphasis to most classicists who wish to expand their range of
information will seem unusually shifted away from the literary
implications of the subject. C.S. Peirce, Carnap, Quine, and
Chomsky loom larger than the few names from the contemporary and
near-contemporary European schools who appear (Saussure in two
pages, Barthes in 7, Jakobson in 2), and the concluding pages are
devoted to "recent philosophical developments" among mainly
analytic philosophers.

It is of particular value that as the anthology approaches the
present, the accompanying commentary becomes more aggressive at
pointing out open areas of controversy and discussion and thus at
stimulating readers to look beyond the tradition to the direction
such studies may now reasonably take.

In short, the book is intelligent and extremely useful, given the
right audience.